Scholarship of Teaching and Learning

Does anyone use this activity in their classes and/or want to try it? I am going to try this in my British Literature to 1800 class (we're currently reading Twelfth Night) to help students make connections between Elizabethan poetry and the ideals of the Renaissance that Shakespeare is repsonding to. After I do it, I'll repsond to this as a comment. If anyone else wants to try, respond as a comment and let me know how it went. I realize this is geared toward literature/humanities in his quote, but I think it can be used in a wide variety of classes--but let me know if you see obvious limitations.  Here's the relevant passage: "My single good idea consists of a game called the minute thesis, and it represents in some ways the germ of this book, in that it constitutes an ideal small teaching ac tivity: free, easy, and capable to use in any size class, for any length of time as you wish, from 10 minutes to the full class period...I wrote the name of the seven novel...

Remember everyone: after reading the book and having some discussions (on-line and maybe a face-to-face meeting later in the semester), the Dr. Lang has offered this incentive for us: "if participants send me an email at the end of the semester telling me how they applied one thing they learned, they get $100 “Dean’s Dollars” they can use to purchase supplies, books, etc. . . " Just another reason to post your reactions to anything you read here, or as a comment. Hopefully our discussions can lead to in-class experiments and/or other tangible results. I'll continue to post some of my responses to individual passages in the days to come, but please feel free to do the same! :) 

Welcome to the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning blog! This should be an easy way to post responses to the semester's book and quickly exchange ideas, problems, questions, and classroom experiences. Ideally, we can also meet to discuss many of these ideas, but sometimes once we end up meeting we've forgotten what we read and/or what we experimented with in the classroom. So I encourage you to post questions or experience as soon as you have them so we can all respond to them.  To start things off, I thought I would post a reaction I had to Chapter 1, "Retrieving," on page 39: here Lang discusses the " reluctance [many facutly have] at the use of regular quizzing because they feel it infantalizes the students or changes the atmosphere of the classroom from one of shared learning and discussion to one of testing and evaluation. I had those exact same feelings about quizzing when I began my teaching career. I just wanted to engage in interesting discussio...